Godfrey ukulele close and plucked a perfect note to salve the seething wound that the brandy could no longer sooth. That moment coincided with holy American patriarch Steve Allen and his long-suffering Jayne thanking Jack for a wonderful night as a way of saying, “Jack, it’s time to go now.” But Jack undaunted borrowed black telephone and rang an army of beatniks to roam Manhattan streets forever in a southerly direction.
Three years Jack spent holed up with his mother on Long Island and fame surrounding him and television appearances and penthouse patriarchs and beatniks hanging on to a phony lifestyle that was honest in books but lost in translation to action when actions became repetitions instead of spontaneous. Finally, he heard that engine calling all cars back to the end of the land sadness, end of the earth gladness. He used his mother’s phone to ring Lawrence Ferlinghetti over at the now-canonized City Lights Bookstore where they hatched a plan for Ti Jean’s surreptitious slide through San Francisco and down to Big Sur where the real writing, the poetry of “Sea,” could commence. He was to arrive by cross country train with a ticket this time, indoors with no flapping arms or beatific bums saying prayers to Saint Theresa, and call the saintly City Lights using an alias. Lawrence would shuttle Jack disguised in fishing hat and slickers down to the cabin near Bixby Bridge where they would dine with Henry Miller. No wine but intoxicating conversation. Only Jack didn’t call first but stumbled into City Lights where the fishing hat and slicker proved no disguise and a three-day bender commenced. First drunk, best drunk.
One fast move took him by bus to Monterey and cab to Bixby Creek where he passed out in a field with an ornery old mule licking his face. Henry Miller had given up on Jack four days earlier. He needed no other introduction. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was done waiting. Saintly City Lights called. He gathered Ti Jean up and took him to the grocery store to amass dry goods and perishables and escorted Jack to the cabin before heading north up the Pacific Coast Highway. Jack was left alone in the cabin. He wandered the fields. He listened to the sea. He practiced haikus written to the ornery mule:
Pacific patriarch
reincarnated from Manhattan penthouse
lick my face—sploosh!
He also found Ferlinghetti’s perfect heavenly ukulele carried back from days of a Pacific theater that performed a new tragedy and endowed the survivors with ennui and existential void. For three weeks, Jack played his spontaneous uke. He carried it down Bixby Creek to a cave overlooking the ocean roaring with choruses of waves fifteen feet high. The sea air and hours of spontaneous strumming took its toll. Iodine crept into the glue holding the blesséd ukulele together. It choked Jack’s deep breath. He felt his own glue returning to liquid form. One fast move and he was gone.
What remained was not, was never the air Ti Jean vibrated on his own.
The Song at the Bottom of a Rabbit Hole
The Five of Swords continues to haunt Patricia Geary. He shows up daily. She sits at her kitchen table with its view of bougainvillea creeping along a shadowbox fence. Hummingbirds suck from the pink flowers. Pat pushes aside wayward student manuscripts and the crusty oatmeal bowl that her husband neglected to remainder in the sink. She lays down three cards. The Five of Swords emerges as one. He is a warning or a reminder of ego struggles and pyrrhic victories. Every morning.
He’s a mysterious character this number Five, standing alone with two swords stacked in his arms and three swords scattered about his feet. Two vanquished fighters wander away.
Of course, Pat knows how to read the card. She knows what it means and how to apply it to her life, but it’s the artwork on this particular deck that sends her down a rabbit hole.
The victor who has gathered the swords looks off. Presumably, he’d be a warrior. Who but a warrior would want five swords? But this victor looks more artist than warrior. His shirt is tattered, frayed at the edges, falling apart not with the slashes of enemy swords or the outstretched fabric of a tussle, but threadbare from too many wearings, too many washings. There isn’t a bloodstain to be found on the blouse. Even if there were, Pat is certain she’d read it as red acrylic paint. Or maybe catsup.
And the victor’s countenance in three-quarter profile, facing the edge of the card while his round, soft eyes glance back at the vanquished: he has the beautiful and innocent façade of a seducer, of a man who tenderly fills his wife’s pipe with opium. Pat knows that face. It originally belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Regardless what the card means, Rossetti’s face is the real ghost, the real haunting.
At moments like this, Pat seeks solace in her ukulele.
Times haven’t called for this consolation in so long that she isn’t sure exactly where she can find the ukulele. Somewhere in her home office. Somewhere buried deep in the geologic layers, in a strata she dates as 1987. The excavation will take the better part of an afternoon. Just the barrier of dolls, stacked like Day-Glo cannonballs and keeping vigil with their huge eyes, will take a few hours of gentle movement.
With brown paper bags from Trader Joe’s substituting for a fossil hammer, Pat begins digging.
Many hours later, around midnight, Pat sits in her office chair and scans the room. Heaped in brown grocery bags are the archives of a writer’s life, which, so far, seems to have been dedicated to the accumulation of worldly goods.
Pat knows what the average mystic has to say about worldly goods: clutter is evil; simplicity is good. But somewhere inside her Pat wonders if this dichotomy itself isn’t a little too much simplicity.
Regardless, the brown paper bags sit full of snapshots of loved ones, school pennants, stories written by aspiring undergraduates, and a variety of once-meaningful effluvia: a first-place certificate, neatly folded, along with the blue ribbon, for the Vista Junior Talent Contest; a yarn voodoo doll; a turtle-shaped pincushion; a ballerina jewelry box; a Ginny doll missing half a leg; imitations of reproduction Blythe dolls; a toy poodle with its fur darkened from the oil and dirt of a younger Pat’s fingers; a mysterious piece of brick with the single letter P; old issues of Marie Claire and Vogue; entire series of mystery novels dedicated to knitting, antiquing, and psychics; acrylic yarn in colors that went out of style a decade ago; single knitting needles missing their partner. Bag after bag after bag.
Atop the bag nearest her, Pat glimpses again a letter from the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the overseers of the Philip K. Dick Award, inviting her to Norwescon in lovely Tacoma, Washington for the award ceremony. Pat and four other finalists would read from their work. One finalist would win. Pat, of course, won. That was a Five of Swords memory.
Unlike most people, Pat was absent when her life changed irrevocably. The gears that would control the machinations of her future turned in Manhattan while Pat vacationed in Lake City, Florida. It was the holiday season, 1986.
Pat took a stroll through the woods near her mother’s home. She wore a cape—always a risky fashion choice. The key, Pat knew, was to wear the cape rather than letting the cape wear you. Superheroes: they let the cape wear them. The cape wore Superman so strongly it carried him into the air, forcing him into a perpetual plank pose. Batman tried to use his cape to tuck his love for a Boy Wonder under while Robin’s love for Batman was broadcast in the fluttering red cloth flowing behind him. Pat draped her cape over her shoulders, keeping her warm on a cool Florida morning. Confidence was key. Pat pulled it off while roaming across campus in Baton Rouge, but here in Florida, with her sister picking at every random hair on Pat’s skin, the cape was a more nebulous proposition.
It followed Pat into the woods.
The conifers of Northern Florida stretched, long and lean, into the gray sky. A young boy scaled the thin trunk of a nearby pine. Pat sat to watch his progress. He shuttled up the tree with a competence familiar to all primates but the human kind. The tree buckled under the boy’s weight. It bowed, impossibly, to the ground. For a tense second, Pat watched as the tree formed a pine archway and set the boy down on the carpet of needles at the forest floor. The boy climbed off. The tree whipped back into place.
Snap!
The boy raced off for another